


Five Little Words

by yangji



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Drabbles, Gemshipping, Grief, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Witchcraft, but with some kind of plot?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:05:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yangji/pseuds/yangji
Summary: All it takes is five little words to speak your heart.





	1. Farewells

**Author's Note:**

> Drabbles turned into a short story using [this prompt list](https://artofyangji.tumblr.com/post/187808209756/five-word-prompts) on tumblr.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What will your last words be to those you've loved, to those you've hurt?

Ryou wrenches himself out of the bed and gasps. He struggles to still his ragged breathing after being torn from sleep, and he strains his ears to listen for the familiar sound that had awoken him. A sliver of moonlight dusts his rumpled sheets but he can see nothing else in the darkness of his room through swollen eyes.

Just hours before he had turned tail and ran from the museum, rejection bitter on his tongue. He was truly alone now. Left behind by friends focused on helping the Pharaoh regain his memories and who did not notice the wetness of his cheeks; abandoned by a spirit hell bent on correcting its own fate while ignoring the possibility of the new one in front of it. Left forgotten, no one ever saw Ryou as he tried to be, only what they expected of him.

Fresh tears prick his eyes again and Ryou rubs them away with the heel of his hand. The exhaustion that comes along with baring one’s emotions, like puking up rancid food so that the body is left empty but free of toxins, settles over his consciousness again. It envelops him in its warm embrace and attempts to soothe him back to the land of dreams when he hears the sound a second time.

A voice whisper-thin in his ear, far away like a bad connection on a collect call.

His body tenses and his breath hitches in his throat. Curled on his side, he slowly pulls the covers away from his eyes, wide and unfocused. He still can't see anything in that all encompassing obscurity, but he can feel it. A thousand years from now and he would recognize the electric energy settling around him. Dead in the ground and he would know the caress against his cheek, the lips ghosting over his brow.

"_**For once… I was wrong.**"_

__

As quickly as the spirit had come, it was gone, leaving the air cold and bare. Instinctively, Ryou knows that it no longer exists on the same plane as he does and that the Ring now hangs empty on the walls of the museum. There would be no other meetings in this lifetime except perhaps in dreams. Tucking his face into his pillow, Ryou cries for the one that he has failed to help and the fate he has not been able to change.

__


	2. Nostalgia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We all have our own ways of coping with loss. Some ways less healthy than others.

Silence can be loud. Sometimes it's so loud that you have to cover your ears and hum a tuneless melody or else you'll go crazy from all the nothingness. When you're so accustomed to two distinct voices in your head, silence is deafening. Even if you hardly spoke to each other, mostly when it was convenient for him, at least someone was there. But now he's joined your mother and sister, and there's no one by your side. Only silence to keep you company and silence can be lonely.

Usually when someone passes away—or ceases to exist since he technically died millennia ago—there's something to remember them by. A photo, their favorite shirt with their distinctive scent. But there's nothing that's distinctly his in a borrowed home, borrowed clothes, a borrowed body. Even the black duster was a costume forgotten in the back of Ryou's closet; it smells of mothballs and Ryou's own sweat. The only thing left is the cards but Ryou can't touch them, refuses to look at them since the Duel City battle. They're kept away in the drawer at his desk.

The only thing Ryou wants, besides to turn back time, the only thing that could serve as an appropriate memorial is buried under the sands of its homeland.

They say time heals all wounds, but Ryou learns that's not exactly true. You just learn to avoid the things that aggravate them. You get so tired of picking at the scab of loss that you bandage it, but without air to help it heal it never will. There's always a dull ache in the center of your chest. And when the pain becomes too much, the mask rotten and falling apart, you take it off and you hurt, tears watering the wound so it's always fresh.

The only thing that helps, the only time Ryou thinks about him without crying is when he's carving because tears get in the way of seeing the finer details and he'd be pissed if Ryou did not accurately record his countenance. He’s sculpted the same face so many times he could do it with his eyes closed. And he does, in his sleep, where the hardened clay turns to supple flesh and the hair tangles in his fingers and the taste of skin is sweet. It’s the only place where the wounds don’t hurt. It’s the only time the silence is welcoming because Ryou’s subconscious can’t think of what the other would say, but it would probably be smug behind a smirk, and it doesn’t matter what they say because they’re together.

He sets the model down among its twin, its triplets, among dozens of the same face looking back at him.

** _"I haven't forgot you yet."_ **


	3. Fortune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Burning bridges on an island will leave you stranded.

The hum of a bee as it drifts past your open window in the spring; your morning alarm permeating into the calm of your dreams until it rouses you; a car horn blaring at you in warning as you stand in the middle of an intersection against the green. Ryou can hear consciousness coming from far off, an insistent droning that threatens to pull him from his intense infatuation.

The desperate grip on his elbow is not a threat. It struggles but manages to wrestle his attention.

The car horn is real, _loud_ and suddenly so close, bumper ghosting against his shin, Ryou can feel its reverberations through his body like the practiced hands of a diviner rattling his bones in their palm. The driver leans out of his window as his hand comes down on the center of his steering wheel again.

“Get out of the damn road!” he bellows.

Forcibly grounded in reality, Ryou finally notices Yugi at his side, applying the pressure to his body that has reigned him in, but failed to actually move them along the crosswalk. This, Ryou can do; he lets his body relax just enough to be escorted to the sidewalk, noting a strangely pleasant sensation just around his navel as he’s pushed along against gravity's will. Behind them, the car honks again and Yugi waves apologetically at its receding tail lights.

But almost getting hit by a car is not what’s important right now. Ryou scans the faces of the people on the streets, some stopping to stare at what would have been that night’s headline news—Pedestrian Struck Down in Head-On Collision: Apparent Suicide—but most moving along, accustomed to ignoring the down-right strange things people in large crowds tend to do. Each face is new and unfamiliar. Someone with the right hair color over there, but completely wrong laugh; a similar grin but eyes too wide and welcoming. If he had seen his shadow walking among them moments before, it’s been driven away by the light of consciousness.

_Shake, shake, throw_. He’s cast out. Disappointment bleaches Ryou dry against the cement and he wonders what can be read in his fragmented pieces.

**“Have you lost your mind?”**

The question, one he’s grown used to hearing the past few months, but refuses to answer, should not come as a surprise. He knows he’s been distant and sullen. The fact that he left his house at all was nothing short of a miracle, but when Yugi called, 11:00AM on Saturday as he always did, to invite him to game night, Ryou had heard the resolve in the other’s voice and knew that if he did not go today, then he'll never go at all. And if Yugi gives up on him, who else would Ryou have to make sure he was at least eating, if not bathing?

But his brush with death has left him unprepared to dodge the question again today. He’s not shaking out of fear. Dull and floundering as all his emotions are these days, it takes him a moment to give a name to what he’s feeling now. Anger is the only word that comes to mind, but that’s not quite _enough_, lacking in intensity. Whatever it is, it's fed by the realization that his choice has been taken from him, that he has to wait a little bit longer for a reunion. Yugi sees it in Ryou’s eyes and takes a step back, letting his hand fall from his friend’s side.

And Ryou is sure it’s that same unnamed feeling that twists his mouth into a sneer. “What does that even mean?” he starts and pauses against the tickle in the back of his throat as it grows used to speaking above a whisper once again. But there’s a fire in the firmament now, its warmth comforting after a desolate winter, so Ryou grasps at it with desperate hands because he wants to feel _something _different. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Of course I haven’t lost my mind! Mine is the only one left!”

The silence between them is stark and Ryou realizes now that he was yelling, not speaking as calmly as he meant to. Yugi takes another step back and shakes his head. When he turns to leave, the tears falling from Yugi’s eyes smother the flames until they fizzle to a scorched path in his wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friend recently opened a tendergem discord server!! If you're interested in joining, message me on tumblr (@artofyangji)


	4. Crafting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When life gives you lemons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not on prompt for tendies week at all, but here's something! Finishing up this short story series so I can focus on some other things.

In a city, on a street, sits a house with no lights on. It looks abandoned but someone walked into it just an hour ago. If you follow their footsteps, through the front door and down the hall, to a room behind the kitchen, you’ll see them. They’re standing there, naked, unaffected by the cold. At their feet is a drawing, a circle, that looks like it’s crumbling as they set it. It’s crooked, a bit more of an oval but in the flickering candle light, the shadows stretching along the floor bend its definition enough to be acceptable.

If you’re not yet scared and running, if you’re quiet enough so that he doesn’t hear you, you can watch him move about the circle. It’s hard to see but it looks like he’s spreading out trash: a chalice, an empty jar, a lit candle, a pot of dirt.

The figure sits in the middle of the circle. You tense because he pulls a knife from somewhere, an overly silver blade that he presses to his palm. He licks his chapped lips and you do the same. He’s shaking and mumbling to himself, eyes skittering to the paper that sits abandoned at his side.

Then he’s speaking and your body won’t move if you want it to.

He invokes the name of a god and offers his devotion. The power in his voice grows stronger so that it echoes over itself again and again, until words are imperceptible from each other, resounding with the magic he imbues in each syllable. When the blade finally breaks the surface of his skin, it is red and puffy and makes a sound like grease on a frying pan. A single drop of blood spills out, a single sign of life that gurgles as though set aflame and grows, flowering into veins and arteries. It blossoms into organs and bones and muscle, sinew, skin and hide. It is life, heart beating and lungs breathing, writhing and warm at the stranger’s feet.

But it is wrong, all wrong.

It has a head five times larger than its body, with arms vestigial and flapping uselessly. Each breath grows longer and more rattled.

The beast blinks once and dies. Its violet eyes, wide and bulbous without its lid, reflect the bowed head from which its gaze has not wavered. Its fur gleams silver under the thick sludge of birth, features lost in its murk. Something has fallen away from its body in its last breaths, five spindles bent as different angles, reaching out.

The figure crouches down. He places a hand over its face.

You hear something. When you strain your ears, you can just make it out.

**“This isn’t what I wanted.”**

He turns to make eye contact with you. You are still unable to move. When he reaches out for you, his hand is stained red.


	5. Ascension

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you have nothing left to lose, what choice will you make?

It only takes two days for Ryou to pack his life away. His twenty years fill three suitcases and seven boxes. His month is filled with dozens of phone calls, all long distance and in stumbling English, signing paperwork, getting paperwork notarized, purchasing plane tickets. His flight leaves at seven in the morning so he’s heading there now with plans to stay at a nearby capsule hotel until check in. He’ll meet his father at the airport in London and Ryou’s things won’t arrive until next week, so they’ll go straight to dinner at his father’s favorite pub and make polite conversation.

Ryou will order fish and chips to keep his hands as busy as possible. In the middle of dinner, his father will take a drink of water to clear his throat. Then, gaze fixed on his plate as he cuts his steak, he will finally ask the question that’s been on his mind the past month, since his son called him late one night and asked to move in.

He will ask why.

Ryou will chew his food as he thinks.

The answer is in every room, whispered secrets overheard by the walls. It’s in every tear he’s cried, alone and seemingly alone; in every drop of sweat and every hour poured into the masterpiece he can no longer bear to look at. He could divine the answer from the scar that blossoms in the middle of his palm, straight through his fate line, but he needn’t bother. Standing in the empty apartment, Ryou feels the answer echoing in his soul.

He will looks his father in the eye and the corner of his lips will curl, but it will throw the light of the pub in disarray across his face so this expression is anything but comforting. Mr. Bakura will never feel so close yet so far from his son as in that moment.

**“Letting go hurts… a lot.”**

And they will finish their dinner in silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This didn't started as an exploration into the stages of grief, but I suppose that's what it became. I contemplated a very different ending, but in the end wanted something uplifting, in a sense.
> 
> And that's the end of this short series. This started as a distraction from Bullet With Butterfly Wings, and now I'm so distracted, I'm not quite sure when the next update for that will be, but it's not abandoned; I just have quite a bit of research to do!


End file.
